Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Why was the water so clear last weekend?

So I went down to San Luis Pass (located between Galveston Island in Galveston County and Follett's Island in Brazoria County) to do some fishing over the Memorial Day weekend. It wasn't the best fishing trip ever: I caught a keeper black drum, but everything else I pulled up was either a stingray or a hardhead catfish.

The big story wasn't the fishing, though; it was the water. As anybody who's ever been to Galveston or Surfside Beach knows, the surf water in this part of Texas is usually very murky. That's because prevailing Gulf of Mexico currents carry muddy water from the Mississippi, Trinity and San Jacinto Rivers towards Galveston in a counter-clockwise direction.

However, last weekend this was not the case. The water was uncharacteristically clear and blue. I took a few pictures of the water from the Pass, on either side of the toll bridge linking Brazoria and Galveston Counties:

So why the uncharacteristically blue water? The Chronicle explains why:
Dr. Tom Linton, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University-Galveston, has a theory on why the water was so clear over the weekend. 
His theory is that Hurricane Alberto off the coast of Alabama in the Gulf of Mexico helped set up a gyre (a large system of rotating ocean currents) east of the Mississippi that began moving the water in a counter-clockwise direction. Hurricanes can go in a counter-clockwise direction. 
The competing, existing Gulf Stream created a gyre west of the Mississippi moving in a clockwise direction. 
"So you got these two gyres acting like floor sweepers, pulling in water from the west and the east," Linton said. 
Much clearer ocean water from the western side of the Gulf Stream, namely the Corpus Christi area and points south, was brought up and began striking the Galveston beach. It all goes to show that a hurricane in the Gulf no matter how big or small can have a very wide-reaching impact.
The murky water that this part of the coast normally receives might be ugly, but the nutrients it provides are essential for marine life. Which may have been why the fishing wasn't so great this past weekend.

In addition to the clear water, I also got a view of an impressive storm moving over Galveston County on Saturday evening:

All in all, it was an enjoyable Memorial Day weekend at the coast, featuring rarely-seen blue water. Now it's on to summer...

Rockets' quest for a title falls short

The Rockets came within one game of their first trip to the NBA Finals since the 1995 season Monday night, but were able to advance no further. For the second time in four seasons, the Rockets' dream of an NBA championship met its end at the hands of the buzzsaw that is the Golden State Warriors.

There are plenty of reasons as to why the Rockets couldn't make it past the Warriors, in spite of having a franchise-record 65 regular season wins, the top seed in the Western Conference, or home-court advantage throughout the playoffs. They include bad officiating, Chris Paul's injury, playing too few people in a rotation, or their inability to mitigate Golden State's signature third-quarter surges. The Houston Press has the list right here.

But here's the main thing: when you run an offense the lives and dies by the three, you're not going to win when you're hitting only less than 16% on your shots beyond the arc or when you go for a statistically unprecedented stretch of 0-27 from three-point range.

Yes, the Rockets had a great season. They came within a game of advancing to the NBA Finals, and they took the defending NBA champs - one of the greatest dynasties in NBA history - down to the wire. But, considering that the 2017-18 season had all the makings of "the year" for the Rockets, the fact that they didn't the Western Conference, much less an NBA title, can only mean that this season ended in disappointment.

There's nothing left for the Rockets to do now, other than to get ready for next season while they look back and wonder what could have been.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

On frequencies, auditory illusions and mosquito ringtones

If you've spent any time at all on the internet over the past week or so, you've probably seen (and heard) the raging debate about "Laurel vs. Yanny." The audio clip that has spawned countless internet debates is essentially an auditory illusion; whether you hear "Laurel" or "Yanny" (or something in between) depends on how our ears and brains pick up and interpret different frequencies. (For the record, I hear "Laurel.")

And, although it's not based on quite the same auditory dynamic, the differences in ability of people to hear and interpret different frequencies at the heart of the "Laurel vs. Yanny" phenomenon reminded me of a post I wrote exactly a decade ago about "the noises that teenagers hate," i.e. high-frequency sounds that younger people can hear but that older people lose the ability to hear as they age. Which made me wonder: how has my hearing changed in the last ten years? The same website I used to try to hear those high-frequency "mosquito ringtones" (that teenagers put on their phones to alert other students in class without the teachers hearing it) when I wrote my post a decade ago is still available, so I put my ears to the test.

It turns out that I can still hear everything from 8 kHz through 14.1 kHz well. The 14.9 kHz tone just barely comes through, but is still there. With my ear close to my phone's speaker and at full volume, I can also still hear the 15.8 kHz tone that is supposed to be inaudible to anyone over 30; however, it is very faint and it struggles to overcome my background tinnitus. I also *think* I can still just barely perceive the 16.7 kHz tone (that nobody over the age of 24 is supposed to hear) as a very faint piercing feeling in my head, but it might be that I am simply tricking myself into thinking I am hearing it when I push the "play" button. As was the case ten years ago, no tone higher than that is perceptible.

So my hearing might have degraded rather modestly over the past ten years, but I can still pick up some of these high frequencies that most people of my age group are supposedly not able to hear.

I can also hear well enough to know that you "Yanny" people are just insane!

Tuesday, May 08, 2018

A glaring omission

I usually don't pay much attention to clickbait listicles - much less share them - but this list of "The 25 Hardest Teams to Root For" made me chuckle. While I don't disagree with any of the NHL, NBA, MLB or NFL teams on it, it's clearly missing one hard-to-cheer-for professional football franchise.

This list appears to be based on championships (or lack thereof), playoff appearances, overall winning record, and whether the team has relocated. Given their history of futility, the Houston Texans certainly belong on it. They have no conference (much less league) championships, have only made the playoffs four times, and have an all-time regular season record of .429.

My only guess is that they were left off this list because they are relatively new (they're only playing their 17th season this fall), as well as the fact that last fall's disappointing season was due more to a freak rash of injuries (Deshaun Watson, Whitney Mercilus, J.J. Watt, etc.) than anything else.

Another team the probably belongs on this list is the Tennessee Titans. They've won no NFL titles, they check the "relocation" box, and when they were the Houston Oilers they were the very definition of futile.

Another summer is upon us

As both of my regular readers might have guessed, we've entered the annual "blog doldrums" here at Mean Green Cougar Red, which means posting activity is going to be light as we make our way into another miserable summer.

Which begs the question: when does summer really begin in Houston, anyway? Eric Berger ponders that question and comes up with the answer: yesterday.
What constitutes summer in Houston? There is no single definition. The summer equinox runs from June 21 to Sept. 23. Meteorological summer encompasses the months of June, July, and August. Neither of these time frames really capture summer in Houston, however, as it gets hot long before June 21, and stays hot well into September.
Speaking for me personally, summer comes when daytime temperatures are in the 90s, and overnight lows correspondingly warm and muggy. I’m afraid we might just be there, folks. We’ll have several days this week in which high temperatures might hit 90 degrees, beginning as early as today. And from a historical perspective, Houston is right on schedule—the average date of the first 90-degree day at Bush Intercontinental Airport is May 7.
This isn't to say that we won't get any more cold not-as-hot fronts (that will at least reduce humidity, if not overall temperatures) going forward, but it does mean that what has been a remarkably wonderful spring is coming to an end and we need to get ready for our annual dose of miserable heat. We can only hope that another hurricane won't also be on this summer's agenda.

As for my agenda this summer: another trip to Europe! We enjoyed the place we stayed (Schladming, Austria) two years ago so much that my girlfriend and I are going back, this time with my parents. Trips to places we didn't get to see last time - Ljubljana, Slovenia and Graz, Austria being at the top of the list - are also planned. But before we go back to the Austrian Alps, we are taking an Adriatic cruise out of Venice to Croatia and Greece. The Royal Caribbean itinerary stops at places - the Acropolis in Athens, Knossos Palace in Crete - I've spent my entire life wanting to see, and my parents want to see these sights as well, while they're still mobile.

I realize that I never wrote up any blog entries or posted any pictures of the trip two years ago. Hopefully I'll actually do better.